When Snow Days Became Zoom Days
It’s 7:00 a.m. and I peek through the shades of my dorm window. Snow is coming down fast, covering the streets and sidewalks in white. Aside from the occasional plow, the street is empty. I pick up my phone and check my email. The subject line reads, “Classes will be held on Zoom today.”
In that moment, my mind goes back in time to a past snow day when I would refresh the school website waiting for “School Closed” to appear. Memories of sledding and snowball fights come rushing back. And just like that, it hits me: Snow days will never be the same.
A few hours later, I’m sitting in my dorm room. Snow drifts against the window as I log into Zoom. I make sure my microphone is muted and my camera is on before joining the meeting. A grid of black squares fills the screen. Not everyone is here. The professor asks the students to turn on their cameras, and some comply. After a moment of awkward silence, the lecture begins.
In less than a minute, I lose focus. The professor’s lips move in the lit square on my screen, but the words blur together. I try to take notes, but my attention drifts to the window. Snow is falling steadily, and a few kids on the street below are pulling sleds through the fresh snow. On my laptop, the lecture continues. It begins to feel less like a class and more like background noise.
I notice the expressions of my classmates. I mostly see blank stares. Others can’t sit still. Some are looking down, likely at their phones, oblivious to the lecture entirely.
The professor finishes the lecture, and I feel some relief, but I am mostly overcome with frustration and a throbbing headache. I begin to wonder why I feel this way. Is it just a sense of nostalgia I have for the snow days of my childhood? Or does my frustration really revolve around something deeper?
I make an effort to look past the nostalgia and figure out what was so wrong about that class. As I think back on it, I realize I wasn’t really engaged for most of the lecture. I was listening and even taking notes at points, but my attention kept slipping. The more I tried to focus, the more effort it seemed to take.
At some point, the question becomes hard to ignore: If it takes this much effort just to stay focused, am I actually learning?
Anyone who has experienced a Zoom class can likely relate. The issue isn’t just a lack of discipline. Our brains rely on nonverbal cues like body language to stay alert, and Zoom strips much of that away. When you can only see your instructor’s face, paying attention becomes more difficult and more exhausting, leading to what many call Zoom fatigue. Zoom doesn’t just make learning harder, it also drains us in the process.
Snow days haven’t become difficult just for students. Teachers now have to recreate entire lesson plans to accommodate the switch to Zoom, and they then have to lecture to a class of blank faces or black rectangles for over an hour with hardly any feedback.
During the pandemic, schools and universities turned to Zoom to keep classes running. Without it, education likely would have come to a halt. But Zoom was never meant to replicate real learning in moments like this. Yet schools have continued to implement remote learning on days when in-person meetings are impossible. COVID-19 made Zoom an efficient solution, so we never stopped using it. But in doing so, we’ve prioritized convenience over learning quality.
I reached out to YU’s administration to try to figure out how snow days operated before the advent of Zoom. They told me that teachers would have to come up with a plan to make up for lost days, either by having make-up classes or by giving additional assignments. The problem is that neither option is ideal. Extending the semester disrupts people’s plans and adding more assignments often turns into unnecessary busywork.
Instead, the focus should be on turning snow days into days that keep the material moving while avoiding a Zoom class. The goal shouldn’t be to replicate the lecture, it should be to hold the place until the next one.
A snow day isn’t a normal day, and trying to force it to be one is what creates the problem in the first place. But that doesn’t mean nothing can happen. A short reading, a few guiding questions or maybe a brief recorded explanation would be enough to keep things moving without pretending a real class took place.
Let’s stop replacing real learning with the appearance of learning.
During the most recent snow day, I was walking down the sidewalk on Amsterdam Avenue and saw a friend building a snowman in front of Morg. I turned to him and said, “Don’t you have a class now?”
“Oh, I don’t go to Zoom classes. It’s too hard to focus,” he told me.
As my Zoom class approached that day, I considered doing the same. I didn’t, but I almost wish I had. Snow days may never be what they were. And that’s okay. But let’s stop turning them into Zoom days.
Photo Caption: Virtual meeting
Photo Credit: Unsplash
